Science Fiction Studies

# 9 = Volume 3, Part 2 = July 1976

Charles Nicol

J.G. Ballard and the Limits of Mainstream SF

J.G. Ballard, like many younger SF authors, is often on the
basis of his style described as a writer of mainstream SF. But the distinction
between mainstream fiction and SF is a matter not of style but of differing
conventions, so that an author wishing to straddle their conjunction must limit
himself in a number of ways. Even after restricting himself to conventions
shared by both mainstream and SF, an author will find his work perceived in
different ways by mainstream and SF readers, since any reader who is not an
omnibibliophile has his own limitations. I propose to demonstrate this by
analyzing two stories by Ballard, "The Drowned Giant" (1965) and
"The Voices of Time" (1960). The first is mainstream SF, the second
"merely" SF; they are both stories of superlative quality.

"The Drowned Giant" first appeared in Playboy rather
than an SF magazine, and would not be out of place in a mainstream anthology.
Its premise, unique but within the threshold of familiarity, is established by
the first sentence: "On the morning after the storm the body of a drowned
giant was washed ashore on the beach five miles to the northwest of the
city."1 The story that follows is developed with straightforward
economy, and the style remains precise and impersonal throughout.

Although giants belong to folklore rather than technology, the
story is SF rather than fantasy. If we accept Todorov’s definition of the
Fantastic, then we notice that there is no ambiguity as to whether the dead
giant is natural or supernatural, no suggestion that the narrator’s inner
reality is at odds with ordinary, external reality—the ambiguities in this
story lie elsewhere. The corpse is a fact, an enormous fact, and hence this
story is not Fantastic. But even if we reject Todorov’s definition, we have
other criteria for judging its genre to be SF: the style is factual and
unemotional; the story follows logically from its initial premise with no new
marvelous occurrences; and no one in the story assumes that any supernatural
agency is involved. Of course, part of the story’s effectiveness lies in the
way it plays against certain expectations created by its first sentence;
further, by the endof the story almost everyone but the
narrator has forgotten that the giant existed, so that the giant’s reality is about
to become ambiguous: the story stops before it becomes fantastic.

Once the initial premise is stated, the remainder of the story
develops three actions or processes simultaneously. Two of these are the initial
excitement and steady decline of interest among the townspeople; and the decay
and eventual dismemberment of the giant corpse. Both of these plot-lines are
observed by an unnamed narrator, who remains passive throughout; a librarian, he
is the only resident of the city sensitive to the possible significance of this
monstrous visitation, the only observer capable of limning this event for
history (a task eventually assigned him by his fellow librarians). The librarian
comes to perceive the dead giant as an event in his own life, assigning personal
meaning to this otherwise random event—this constitutes the third plot line.
Since the significance of the giant is personal to the librarian, it tends to
shift; and as it shifts, it builds up a series of possible meanings. That
interpretations are proposed suggests that this is a meaningful event; and that
the interpretations are rejected suggests that the meaning has not yet been
found. The drowned giant’s dissolution is a significant event, the meaning of
which is unclear but undoubted. The story has resonance and power, conforming to
that specific type of modern literature, the open-ended parable.

That "The Drowned Giant" is both literature and
mainstream fiction I hope to demonstrate by listing three literary analogues—analogues
because the story is an original work and not an imitation. The first is Kafka’s
"Metamorphosis," another open-ended parable—indeed, while this story
could have been written without the existence of Kafka,2 it very
possibly would not appear as contiguous with mainstream fiction had Kafka not
expanded the limits of that fiction. "Metamorphosis" similarly opens
with an "impossible" event: the protagonist has turned overnight into
a giant cockroach (or, as Nabokov would have it, a dung-beetle).3 The
rest of Kafka’s story is realistic, even naturalistic: the protagonist’s
family is at first not just surprised, but horrified; soon the family forces
this miraculous event into the narrow channels of their own banal perceptions so
that the protagonist is seen as only a giant insect and not their relative;
eventually he is all but forgotten, and dies of neglect and starvation. The same
process of turning the miraculous into the banal and eventually forgotten occurs
as one of the plot lines in "The Drowned Giant," where the initially
amazed townspeople soon make a playground of the giant’s ears and nostrils,
and build a campfire on his chest; later see the body as merely a source of
rotting flesh to be turned into fertilizer; and eventually forget him so
thoroughly that his "immense pizzle," preserved in a traveling freak
show, is labeled as belonging to a whale, and "even those who first saw him
cast up on the shore after the storm, now remember the giant, if at all, as a
large sea beast." As in Kafka, the initial marvellous event seems to have
an immense, hovering significance, and to be symbolic of some agony inherent in
the human condition.

The frequent confusion of the giant with a whale inevitably
recalls Moby Dick in its development of an enormous, ambiguous symbol. We
must assume that Ballard is deliberately pointing to Melville when his narrator
observes that "this drowned leviathan had the mass and dimensions of the
largest sperm whale." The narrator himself could easily be the sub-sub-sub
librarian who provided the "Extracts" at the beginning of Melville’s
narrative, while the giant’s flesh about to be processed for fertilizer or
cattle food is referred to as "blubber." Only Melville’s whale comes
to mind when searching for an analogue to the majestic enigma of the giant.

The third literary analogue is inescapable, for it also
belongs to that grey area where literature is also mainstream SF: Gulliver’s
Travels. Here the analogue is so obvious that Ballard must steer clear of
direct comparisons. "The Drowned Giant" is intermediate between
Gulliver’s two voyages concerned with huge size differentials. Obviously the
giant washed up on the beach reminds us of Gulliver himself, washed up from the
sea on the beach of Lilliput. Our memories of Lilliput add a comic dimension to
Ballard’s story, making the inhabitants of his city seem equally trivial men
working at trivial occupations in a toylike never-never-land; we are amused when
the narrator inspects the giant’s finger-nails, "each cut symmetrically
to within six inches of the quick," and decides that they demonstrate
"refinement of temperament." But Swift’s purpose in Lilliput was
political satire; the most satirical passage in "The Drowned Giant"
concerns the city’s men of science (themselves the subject of Swift’s satire
in Gulliver’s visit to the Academy of Lagado):

That afternoon the police returned and cleared a way through
the crowd for a party of scientific experts—authorities on gross anatomy and
marine biology—from the university.... The experts strode around the giant,
heads nodding in vigorous consultation, preceded by the policemen who pushed
back the press of spectators. When they reached the outstretched hand the
senior officer offered to assist them up onto the palm, but the experts
hastily demurred.

But since the narrator is one of the "little"
people, we are equally reminded of Gulliver’s voyage to Brobdingnag, the land
of the giants. This comparison is reinforced by the narrator’s references to
such identifiable geographical and cultural signs as the Nile and the Odyssey—the
little people belong to our world; we are they. In that voyage of Gulliver,
Swift pointed out how gross the flesh seems when magnified, and certainly
Ballard’s giant is predominantly a thing of the flesh.

But the giant’s flesh is of interest to Ballard only because
it is subject to such gross decay; indeed, one might describe Ballard’s
concern throughout his career as an investigation into the possibilities of
decay—or to put it more nicely, the potentialities of entropy. Since
the giant is actually symbolic of something else, his size is really a matter of
perception, expressing the viewpoint of the observer. Just as Alice’s sudden
size changes in Wonderland reflected the child’s differing perceptions of
herself (almost a baby, nearly an adult), the narrator of "The Drowned
Giant" finds that the giant seems larger or smaller during different visits
to the corpse. This apparent alteration of size is one of Ballard’s techniques
for giving surprising life to the inanimate corpse.

What is most fascinating and original about "The Drowned
Giant" is that the dead body is one of the principal actors in the story.
The giant’s decay has a life of its own, and creates a personality for the
giant that had been absent at his initial appearance. At first the body seems as
graceful as a statue of an idealized youth: "the shallow forehead, straight
high-bridged nose, and curling lips" remind the narrator of "a Roman
copy of Praxiteles," while "the elegantly formed cartouches of the
nostrils" emphasize "the resemblance to sculpture." At this time,
the narrator has the impression that the giant is "merely asleep,"
ready to "suddenly stir and clap his heels together." Visiting the
corpse again three days later, the narrator realizes how much he identifies with
the dead giant: "to all intents the giant was still alive for me, indeed
more alive than many of the people watching him." By now, the giant had
aged:

The combined effects of sea water and the tumefaction of the
tissues had given the face a sleeker and less youthful look. Although the vast
proportions of the features made it impossible to assess the age and character
of the giant, on my previous visit his classically modeled mouth and nose
suggested that he had been a young man of discreet and modest temper. Now,
however, he appeared to be at least in early middle age. The puffy cheeks,
thicker nose and temples, and narrowing eyes gave him a look of well-fed
maturity that even now hinted a growing corruption to come.

By the following day, the giant has become more crude,
decadent, unkempt, "but despite this, and the continuous thickening of his
features, the giant still retained his magnificent Homeric stature."
Indeed, he seems ashamed of his condition: "The slope of the firmer sand
tilted the body toward the sea, the bruised swollen face averted in an almost
conscious gesture." The narrator continues to identify with the giant,
noting that "this ceaseless metamorphosis, a macabre life-in-death, alone
permitted me to set foot on the corpse." Now he finds the emotions of death
the dominant feature of the giant’s face, "a mask of exhaustion and
helplessness": "For the first time I became aware of the extremity of
this last physical agony of the giant, no less painful for his unawareness of
the collapsing musculature and tissues." Two days later, the giant’s
features have entered a phase of final humiliation, like the visage of a
battered and punch-drunk fighter: "The giant’s swollen cheeks had now
almost closed his eyes, drawing the lips back in a monumental gape. The once
straight Grecian nose had been twisted and flattened, stamped into the
ballooning face by countless heels." By the next day, the head has been
removed, leaving nothing to observe save the purely mechanical rendering of the
massive flesh into fertilizer. The reader has been led by Ballard into
identifying with the dead giant’s humiliation.

Aside from this narrative excellence, the story also has a
symbolic level, a level investigated by the narrator as he seeks to explain why
the giant fascinates him. This can most easily be demonstrated with two
quotations, the first coming when the narrator initially recognizes that the
giant is "still alive" for him:

What I found so fascinating was partly his immense scale,
the huge volume of space occupied by his arms and legs, which seemed to
confirm the identity of my own miniature limbs, but above all, the mere
categorical fact of his existence. Whatever else in our lives might be open to
doubt, the giant, dead or alive, existed in an absolute sense, providing a
glimpse into a world of similar absolutes of which we spectators on the beach
were such imperfect and puny copies.

For the narrator, the giant’s reality is metaphysical: he
belongs to a "World of... absolutes." God seems the most likely
metaphysical "absolute": the giant is proof that God exists, with men
"puny copies" in his image; the existence of God confirms the identity
of the narrator. Other readers may prefer to see this as a more general
reference to an unspecified metaphysical construct. Yet eventually the narrator
recognizes that the giant, whether God or not, is indeed dead. He becomes
"reluctant to visit the shore, aware that [he has] probably witnessed the
approaching end of a magnificent illusion." It is "almost with
relief" that the narrator watches the corpse being removed, since its
dissolution has paralleled his own disillusion.4

Only when the corpse has been completely dismembered and its
less destructible fragments distributed all over the city can the narrator again
entertain his illusion. Discovering the giant’s thighbones framing the doorway
of a wholesale meat merchant, the narrator has "a sudden vision of the
giant climbing to his knees upon those bare bones and striding away through the
streets of the city, picking up the scattered fragments of himself on his return
journey to the sea." But the other inhabitants of the city have forgotten
the giant altogether, or confused him with other oceanic creatures. Yet his
ribs, pelvis, and backbone still remain on the beach, witness to what the
narrator has learned of the decay of men and ideas.

SF fans might not have enjoyed "The Drowned Giant"
as much as mainstream readers, since Ballard slights his science, providing no
explanations for the giant’s appearance. And the more conventional SF story
would have investigated where the giant came from, rather than what he meant.
Further, the society described in "The Drowned Giant" soon lapses into
its uneventful existence, a situation not generally appreciated by SF readers,
who seem to desire apocalyptic climaxes rather than anticlimactic dissolves. The
image of the face of a dead giant, moving from a dreaming tranquility to
excesses of agony and shame, is poetic but not necessarily within the poetry of
science fiction.

In contrast, the poetry of "The Voices of Time"
should appeal directly to the SF reader, while appearing to the mainstream
reader as a mass of jumbled images. Here the narrative is rich in explanations
and partial explanations, while the method of composition is one of complexity
rather than simplicity. The reader is bombarded with SF images, all striking and
all pointing in the same direction: the universe is running down, the sun is
running down, earth is running down, man is running down, and the protagonist of
the story is running down most rapidly of all. The focus is on entropy. But the
power of the story lies in the many ways in which its characters try to escape
entropy, and in the sterility of their attempts. The hope of escaping time is
held out like a brass ring, but each attempt to reach the ring leads to madness
and death. Eventually the reader comes to see death as itself an escape from
entropy, and the story ends in tranquility: the tranquility of exhaustion.

Although the style is usually subordinate to the subject
matter, in a few places Ballard employs a bravura technique to underline certain
unique situations. Generally, the chief purpose of his narrative method is to
present large quantities of information without using straight exposition;
Ballard includes numerous tapes, diaries, and computer read-outs as both
information sources and actual "voices of time." Consequently, much of
the story’s background is presented elliptically, and must be reconstructed by
the reader. Many writers have included such "documentation," but here
the most revealing literary analogue probably would not occur to most readers:
in method and content, "The Voices of Time" resembles Eliot’s Wasteland,
with a great number of images piled one on the other to form an inescapable
network of arid futility.

The time of the story is the late twentieth century. The chief
features of the landscape are mountains, a salt lake of moderate size, and
vegetation belonging to the cactus family—all reinforcing the picture of bleak
sterility. The manmade features are equally arid and impotent: a dry swimming
pool littered with dead leaves; a number of enormous, flat, circular concrete
targets once used for artillery practice; and a seven-story house built in a
bewildering maze that turns out to be a geometric model of the square root of
minus one. The site seems to be an imagined Southwest, possibly Alamogordo, New
Mexico.

The basic "scientific" idea of the story is that
high levels of radiation stimulate "two inactive genes which occur in a
small percentage of all living organisms, and appear to have no intelligible
role in their structure or development." Here the mainstream reader is at a
disadvantage; unfamiliar with fiction that has science at its core, he will
assume these silent genes to be Ballard’s fantasy (unless he happens to know
better). The SF reader, on the other hand, while probably knowing little more
than the general reader, is attuned to the subtle distinctions between fantasy
and fact in SF stories; even without previous knowledge, he will assume that
Ballard got those silent genes from some other storehouse than his imagination—and,
at least where fruit flies are concerned, he will be correct. Thus the mainstream
reader, failing to realize the extent to which Ballard is extrapolating from the
actual world, is at an immediate disadvantage in assessing the story’s power.

Because "some people have speculated that organisms
possessing the silent pair of genes are the forerunners of a massive move up the
evolutionary slope, that the silent genes are a sort of code, a divine message
that we inferior organisms are carrying for our more highly developed
descendants," in Ballard’s story a scientist named Whitby has spent ten
years perfecting a technique for irradiating them. But if there is any
"divine message" in the silent genes, it is that God is an insane
nihilist:

Without exception the organisms we’ve irradiated have
entered a final phase of totally disorganized growth, producing dozens of
specialized sensory organs whose function we can’t even guess. The results are
catastrophic—the anemone will literally explode, the Drosophila cannibalize
themselves, and so on. Whether the future implicit in these plants and animals
is ever intended to take place, or whether we’re merely extrapolating—I don’t
know. Sometimes I think, though, that the new sensory organs developed are
parodies of their real intentions.

Thus the hope of transcendence leads instead to madness and
destruction. Because of the pessimistic implications of this experiment, Whitby
has committed suicide.

Radiation activates the silent genes because those genes
"alter the form of the organism and adapt it to living in a hotter
radiological climate. Soft-skinned organisms develop hard shells, these contain
heavy metals as radiation screens." At the same time that these adaptations
are proving futile in the laboratory, they are occurring in nature; the outside
world has begun to reflect the miniature world of the laboratory. For instance,
Robert Powers (the protagonist) discovers a frog that has grown an articulated,
external lead shell to protect itself from excessive radiation. The local cacti
are "assimilating gold in extractable quantities." Clearly, the cause
for these drastic changes in the fauna and flora is a higher level of radiation.
(The story suggests that Ballard has extrapolated these particular mutations
from what was observed at Eniwetok.)

Several reasons are elliptically offered for this increased
radiation count. From one casual conversation the reader may infer that World
War III has already occurred. Other references in the story present an even more
ominous explanation: the sun is cooling and emitting heavier radiation.

The images of entropy in "The Voices of Time" are
extremely insistent, ranging from the largest to the smallest things in the
universe. Everything is coming to an end; the universe itself is running down.
Signals from the stars have been decoded by computers and turn out to be merely
a series of countdowns. The most stunning of these series is sent from the Canes
Venatici group at intervals of 97 weeks and includes over 500 million digits.
The end of that countdown will coincide with the end of the universe. From the
universe down through the sun, from agricultural yields to human fertility,
everything has begun to run down. Most people now sleep ten and a half hours a
night. At the lower end of the scale, even the genes that transmit life are
"wearing out."

Still, the accelerated decline on Earth is a special case,
caused by higher radiation levels. Humans who carry the silent genes have become
subject to narcoma, which causes them to sleep for increasingly large portions
of the day; eventually they lapse into permanent sleep. Powers, the protagonist,
has developed narcoma symptoms, and in his diary his tabulation of hours of
consciousness is still another countdown: "June 14: 9½ hours.... June 19:
8¾ hours.... June 25: 7½ hours.... July 3: 5¾ hours." Thus Powers is not
only the protagonist but the objective correlative of the story, embodying in
himself all the forces of entropy and all the apparently sterile hopes for a new
future that the silent genes represent.

But throughout Powers’ decline, Ballard has also provided
him with certain images of potentiality and change. His name is the most obvious
example. The most complex of these images is the enormous "ideogram"
that Powers builds with cement during trance states; Powers himself is never
consciously aware of constructing this enormous cement pattern. Since Ballard
explicitly describes this pattern as a "crude Jungian mandala," the
reason for its construction is clearly to be found in the works of Jung: a
person will create or imagine mandalas when, having reached a critical stage, he
is about to resolve his difficulties or at least remove them to a different
plane.5 That Powers creates a mandala suggests his imminent potential
for change; that Whitby had also created the same mandala just before committing
suicide suggests that this potential may itself be arrested or sterile. But
Powers is consciously determined to test his potential, and plans to use Whitby’s
irradiation technique to activate his own silent genes—the first human to do
so.

Because Powers’ decision is such a desperate and heroic
gamble, Ballard uses a virtuoso technique to dramatize the time that Powers
spends under the Maxitron (Whitby’s irradiation machine): the reader perceives
this event through the sense organs of a mutant anemone. Since the anemone is
highly sensitive to radiation, it translates the Maxitron’s power-flow into
first visual and then auditory terms, in a dazzling display of synesthesia:

Gradually an image formed, revealing an enormous black
fountain that poured an endless stream of brilliant light over the circle of
benches and tanks. Beside it a figure moved, adjusting the flow through its
mouth. As it stepped across the floor its feet threw off vivid bursts of
color, its hands racing along the benches conjured up a dazzling chiaroscuro,
balls of blue and violet light that exploded fleetingly in the darkness like
miniature star-shells.

Photons murmured.... The silent outlines of the laboratory
began to echo softly, waves of muted sound fell from the arc lights and echoed
off the benches and furniture below. Etched in sound, their angular forms
resonated with sharp persistent overtones.

One doubts that a mainstream reader can make this sudden
transition, but the SF reader should find it stimulating. This bravura passage
prepares the reader for a second such passage, when Powers registers his
awareness of the voices of time in sensual terms, apparently having developed
new sense organs of his own. Further, this radical shift in narrators emphasizes
the potential of the experiment, and the anemone’s narration ends on a note of
elation: "Streaming through a narrow skylight, its voice clear and strong,
interwoven by numberless overtones, the sun sang...." [Ballard’s
ellipsis]

However, Powers’ attempt to free himself from entropy ends
in death. After his silent genes have been activated, he is able to perceive
time so intensely that he can drive his car with his eyes closed, steering
between the mountains and the salt take by "feeling" the interface of
"the two time fronts." As his perception becomes more acute, he
apparently can "feel the separate identity of each sand grain and salt
crystal calling to him from the surrounding ring of hills." Finding the
center of his huge concrete mandala, he listens to the voices of the stars,
"the timesong of a thousand galaxies overlaying each other in his
mind." Overwhelmed by the eternal countdown radiating from the Canes
Venatici star group, he feels "his body gradually dissolving, its physical
dimensions melting into the vast continuum of the current." "Beyond
hope now but at last at rest," he is swept into "the river of
eternity." At this moment, Powers has died. Although described
attractively, his death is a transcendence of entropy only in the sense that he
has left life behind; there seems to be no future in eternity. This pessimistic
view is emphasized by the final paragraphs of the story, as Kaldren visits the
laboratory and finds all the experimental plants and animals dead. Yet the wider
view of the story is to emphasize entropy itself, a force to which everything in
the universe is subject.

Kaldren’s meditations end the story; although Kaldren never
sleeps, he is "half-asleep" in the final paragraph. Since he has
earlier given Powers the message that contains the story’s title, we must
assume that Kaldren is, in part, a stand-in for the author; very possibly it is
Ballard himself who is building a collection of "end-prints,...final
statements, the products of total fragmentation. When I’ve got enough together
I’ll build a new world for myself out of them."6 It is typical
of Ballard’s precision in construction that when Powers does hear the voices
of time to which Kaldren refers in the following passage, he explicitly hears
both the galaxies and the grains of sand:

You’re not alone, Powers, don’t think you are. These are
the voices of time, and they’re all saying good-bye to you. Think of yourself
in a wider context. Every particle of your body, every grain of sand, every
galaxy carries the same signature. As you’ve just said, you know what the time
is now, so what does the rest matter? There’s no need to go on looking at the
clock.

All of the images of "The Voices of Time" coalesce
in Kaldren’s philosophy: like Powers, throw away your wristwatch. Think of the
wider context and do not fear death.

In "The Voices of Time," Ballard has used science
fiction to fulfill the traditional role of the poet: to meditate on time and
death. Entropy. As an SF reader, I can interpret and appreciate this story as
literature because its subject matter is not alien to me. But I doubt that a
mainstream reader can appreciate the subtlety and beauty of such SF works,
because his own set of literary values is limited by a tradition that excludes
them. It is not the writer, but the reader, that builds the distinction between
science fiction and mainstream fiction into a wall. One can find the gates in
that wall, as Ballard did in "The Drowned Giant," but "The Voices
of Time" kept to a different path. I believe this story is literature; I’m
also convinced that it is unavailable to a reader experienced only in mainstream
fiction.

NOTES

1. "The Drowned Giant" appeared in Playboy under
the title "Souvenir." Quotations from both "The Drowned
Giant" and "The Voices of Time" follow the text of Chronopolis
and Other Stories (US 1971).

2. Ballard is obviously familiar with Kafka, and one may infer
an influence. Kafka is the only fiction writer mentioned in "The Voices of
Time."

3. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (US 1973), p 156.

4. A more recent open-ended parable involving a giant,
symbolic corpse is Donald Barthelme’s new novel, The Dead Father.

5. A further complication is that Powers, a neuro-surgeon who
is about to become permanently asleep, has operated on another principal
character, Kaldren, removing his sleepcenter so that Kaldren does not sleep at
all; in addition, Kaldren follows Powers around obsessively, like a shadow. In a
sense, then, Powers has created his opposite and shadow in Kaldren—a pattern
of significance in Jungian psychology. Kaldren’s girlfriend, Coma, also seems
part of this pattern.

6. Compare T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland: "These
fragments I have shored against my ruin." The Wasteland is presumably
part of Kaldren’s collection.

ABSTRACT

The distinction between mainstream fiction and SF is a matter
not of style but of differing conventions, and an author such as Ballard, who
may be read in terms either of SF or of the mainstream, must limit himself in a
number of ways. Even after restricting himself to shared conventions, such an
author will find his work perceived in different ways by mainstream and SF
readers, since any reader who is not an omnibibliophile has his or her own
limitations. I propose to analyze two stories by Ballard: "The Drowned
Giant," (1965) and "The Voices of Time" (1960). The first is
mainstream SF, the second "merely" science fiction: both are
superlative stories.